ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP 1680-7324 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-11-3631-2011 Episodes of cross-polar transport in the Arctic troposphere during July 2008 as seen from models, satellite, and aircraft observations Sodemann H. 1 Pommier M. 2 Arnold S. R. 3 Monks S. A. 3 Stebel K. 1 Burkhart J. F. 1 Hair J. W. 4 Diskin G. S. 4 Clerbaux C. 2 5 Coheur P.-F. 5 Hurtmans D. 5 Schlager H. 6 Blechschmidt A.-M. 7 Kristjánsson J. E. 7 Stohl A. 1 Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), Kjeller, Norway UPMC Univ. Paris 06, Université Versailles St-Quentin, CNRS/INSU, LATMOS-IPSL, Paris, France Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Atmospheric Sciences, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia, USA Spectroscopie de l'Atmosphère, Chimie Quantique et Photophysique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 19 04 2011 11 8 3631 3651 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/3631/2011/acp-11-3631-2011.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/3631/2011/acp-11-3631-2011.pdf

During the POLARCAT summer campaign in 2008, two episodes (2–5 July and 7–10 July 2008) occurred where low-pressure systems traveled from Siberia across the Arctic Ocean towards the North Pole. The two cyclones had extensive smoke plumes from Siberian forest fires and anthropogenic sources in East Asia embedded in their associated air masses, creating an excellent opportunity to use satellite and aircraft observations to validate the performance of atmospheric transport models in the Arctic, which is a challenging model domain due to numerical and other complications. <br><br> Here we compare transport simulations of carbon monoxide (CO) from the Lagrangian transport model FLEXPART and the Eulerian chemical transport model TOMCAT with retrievals of total column CO from the IASI passive infrared sensor onboard the MetOp-A satellite. The main aspect of the comparison is how realistic horizontal and vertical structures are represented in the model simulations. Analysis of CALIPSO lidar curtains and in situ aircraft measurements provide further independent reference points to assess how reliable the model simulations are and what the main limitations are. <br><br> The horizontal structure of mid-latitude pollution plumes agrees well between the IASI total column CO and the model simulations. However, finer-scale structures are too quickly diffused in the Eulerian model. Applying the IASI averaging kernels to the model data is essential for a meaningful comparison. Using aircraft data as a reference suggests that the satellite data are biased high, while TOMCAT is biased low. FLEXPART fits the aircraft data rather well, but due to added background concentrations the simulation is not independent from observations. The multi-data, multi-model approach allows separating the influences of meteorological fields, model realisation, and grid type on the plume structure. In addition to the very good agreement between simulated and observed total column CO fields, the results also highlight the difficulty to identify a data set that most realistically represents the actual pollution state of the Arctic atmosphere.

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